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External hackers and insider threats. Customer expectations and government mandates.

Data protection is a complex challenge, and it demands attention at every level of an organization. PKWARE's in-house experts are here to help you stay up to date on best practices, emerging trends, and new resources for enterprise data security.

After two years of controversy and confusion, the era of the GDPR is about to begin. As of May 25, Europe's groundbreaking General Data Protection Regulation will have the force of law in all 28 EU member nations, fundamentally changing the way businesses and government agencies deal with personal data.

Cyber attacks negatively impact governments, corporations, and individuals on a daily basis. One of the many reasons for our ongoing vulnerability is that we lack a cohesive approach for defending US interests against cyber threats. It has become painfully clear that neither the government nor the private sector can solve the problem on its own. There must be a joint effort in protecting our country’s national interest in terms of cyber security.

PKWARE is proud to announce that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Rick Hofmann, Vice President of Channels and Alliances, to its prestigious list of 2018 Channel Chiefs. The executives on this annual list represent top leaders who excel at driving growth and revenue in their organization through channel partners.

No one expects politicians to be experts on every subject. Elected officials and agency directors have to make decisions on dozens of complicated issues, many of which lie far outside their areas of expertise. That's why public discussion and expert opinions have always played key roles in shaping our laws and policies.

Here at PKWARE, we're deeply involved in the ongoing debate about strong encryption, and whether governments can (or should) require backdoors for encrypted communications and devices. While some politicians have advocated against backdoors, many others in Congress and law enforcement continue to call for measures that would make our data less private and less secure.

Cybersecurity isn’t the easiest thing in the world to visualize. Since we don’t actually see information as it travels across networks or is written to disks, it can be difficult to picture exactly what needs to happen in order to keep data safe.

So just for fun, we’re going to do a bit of time travel to see what today’s data protection concepts would look like if they were applied to paper files instead of digital ones. We don’t need to go back too far—40 years will do the trick—to arrive at a time when the vast majority of information was still being created and stored on paper.

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1978. Most large companies are already using computers to perform certain tasks, and early adopters are beginning to buy personal computers like the TRS-80 and Apple II. The majority of workers, however, still do their work on paper, and that’s what you’ll be doing today after your $1.75 taxi ride to the company headquarters.

In the life of every important technology, there’s a tipping point—a moment when the technology ceases to be a niche product or an emerging concept and becomes a part of everyday life. For mobile phones, to choose an obvious example, that moment came almost twenty years ago. For cloud computing, it was perhaps five years ago. For encryption, it’s happening now.

We've seen plenty of massive data breaches in recent years— thefts that involve the personal info of hundreds of millions of people and cost the affected companies hundreds of millions of dollars. So far, however, we seem not to have learned our lesson. Cybersecurity continues to take a back seat to dozens of other issues in corporate boardrooms, in legislative chambers, and in the media.

It's time to ask the obvious question: how much worse do things need to get before our attitudes change?

The rising epidemic of data breaches, the evolution of internal and external cyber threats, and increasingly demanding privacy regulations have put pressure on companies around the world to become more proactive about protecting sensitive information against loss, theft, and misuse.

For many organizations, a proactive approach to information security means establishing data governance policies and creating an operational framework for encryption. Strong data encryption is the best way to secure data while allowing the right people to access it, and has become a must-have component of information security in the eyes of consumers, government regulators, and corporate boards. But encryption alone is rarely a complete solution.

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About PKWARE

PKWARE solutions help organizations meet their data security and regulatory compliance goals. With more than 35,000 customers and over 30 years in enterprise data protection, PKWARE has experience and capabilities no one else can match.